I need to copy some bad DVD's

Newbie Forum
#1

Hi all,

I need to copy some bad DVD’s (so what else is new?).
I purchased an expensive plastic model submarine and an aftermarket kit to turn it into a functioning rc sub. The aftermarket kit came with five instructional DVD’s explaining how to use the kit. The DVD’s are poorly made and none of them will play completely on either of my DVD players. The company has replaced several of the DVD’s but the replacements are no better than the originals. I tried to clean them and polish them and have probably damaged them further.

I would like to treat them as damaged movie DVD’s and extract as much of the data from them as possible and then write this data onto fresh writable DVD’s that will then play without hanging up, freezing, or ejecting themselves from the machine. There might be glitches and blank spots but I’m sure I’d have a better shot at filling in the blanks with a running DVD than with one that won’t run at all.

Could anyone suggest some software that would give me the best chance of accomplishing my goal? I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks,
Mark

#2

How well do the disks play on your computer? If you don’t have software for playing dvd-video, try VLC media player, which is free to download and use: www.videolan.org Find out if your dvd drive in your computer is better at reading them.

The first thing I would try, assuming these disks are not encrypted, would be simply to go to the dvd drive in My Computer, right click on it and copy and paste the contents of the disk to the hard drive. Worth a shot anyway. :slight_smile:

Using dvd copying programs that have been developed for commercially made movies might be problematic. Most will shut down after failing to copy after a few times. Some can be set up to ignore read errors, but the result may not be useful. If you want to try this, you can get DVDDecrypter from www.mrbass.org To get it to ignore read errors, look in Tools–>Settings–>I/O tab, and put a check mark in the Ignore Read Errors box.

A better tool might be ISOBuster. There is a free version available for download, but the actions you need to copy might be more than the free one can do. You might be prompted to buy the full version. And if the disks are encrypted, this program will not work.

ISOPuzzle is freeware but I have not used it.

#3

The DVD’s play much better on my PC than they do on my DVD players, but still with some problems. Still, it gives me hope that one of the packages you mentioned may solve the problem. I’m going to try them now.

Thanks!

#4

Try copying the data off with ISO Buster.